The World

* The Jewish writers of the Bible based their idea of the Garden of Eden on the Persian pairidaeza.

* The Scythians were skilled horsemen but also exquisite craftsmen. Like their fellow Aryans, the Persians, they revered fire as the senior of their seven gods, whose relations with men were mediated by transgender shamans. ‘Their favoured intoxicants,’ wrote Herodotos, ‘were hashish with fermented mare’s milk.’ Scythians cherished silver and gold artefacts, beautifully worked, but they were a civilization that ritualized aggression. They crucified and beheaded their enemies, scalped them (scalping developed simultaneously in the Old and New Worlds), flayed them and used their skins to cover their quivers, their blood as a drink and their heads, sliced below the eyebrows, as drinking cups. Every hundredth prisoner of war was sacrificed. As for their own dead, Scythians removed their brains and guts, which they ate, and interred them in burial chambers, filled with gold artefacts, sacrificed slaves and relatives and horses, all covered by mounds.

* Herodotos is our only source for this Scythian story, wherein Cyrus’s death reflects the Greek view of Persian kings as voracious, effeminate tyrants.

* The Persians buried the giblets in a golden sarcophagus in Cyrus’ simple Lydian-style temple that still stands near his paradise of Pasargadae.

* According to Herodotos and other Greek sources, he was alleged to be ‘half mad’, and it was said that he slaughtered the sacred Egyptian bull Apis, used humans for target practice, killed his wife, buried twelve noblemen upside down and taught justice to a corrupt judge by skinning him, tanning him and using the leather to make a chair which he then offered to his victim’s son and successor as judge: ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘on what you sit.’

* Herodotos and the court doctor-historian Ctesias both tell this story, implying that Darius somehow cheated his way to the throne – very Persian behaviour in Greek eyes. The story of Darius’ equine vaginal gambit reflected the importance of horses in Persian–Median culture. A horse was regularly sacrificed in honour of Cyrus. The story was based on the Persian practice, hippomancy, divination using the behaviour of horses.

* When she was older, Atossa found a tumour in her breast. Most of Darius’ doctors were Egyptians, but Darius had captured a Greek doctor, Democedes, who had set the king’s broken ankle. Democedes lived splendidly as royal doctor but longed to return home. Now he operated successfully on Atossa’s tumour, the first recorded mastectomy. Allowed to join a Persian embassy to Greece, he escaped and returned home.

* Hinduism itself is composed of different beliefs, practices and scriptures. Many of its traditions emerged out of the divinely revealed Vedas (the ‘knowledge’, composed c. 1500–500 BC) and its later sacred Vedic texts including the Puranas (‘old’ or ‘ancient’, composed from around AD 300). The Vedas include liturgical hymns and guidance for Brahmins (priests). Only Brahmins had the authority to use the Vedas in rituals.

* At the same time, in China, divided into warring kingdoms, a philosopher created his own moral order, founded on an ethical vision of China as a realm of families, a hierarchy starting with the ruler and extending down to the father’s rule over his family. Kong Qiu, later known as Master Kong (latinized by seventeenth-century Jesuits into Confucius), was a pragmatist and an enthusiast, not merely a bloodless ascetic – ‘Why didn’t you say how passionate I am?’ he used to ask his followers – and he liked to ride and hunt. But, faced with interminable wars and power plays, he advocated an ethical path, ‘the Way’: ‘When the Way prevails under Heaven’, there would be order; without it there would be chaos. Yet he also preached kindness: ‘Is there one word to guide a person throughout life?’ asked a follower. ‘How about “reciprocity”?’ suggested Confucius. ‘Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.’ It was a fourth-generation disciple, Mengzi (Mencius), who developed and structured his ideas. Confucius’ Analects, written before 200 BC, proposed orderly realms, ruled by kings guided by virtue and advised by scholars like himself; prayer would win divine harmony in the cosmos which would in turn deliver moral harmony on earth.

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